Q&A | May 29, 2014

MSP Questions For Quantifying Objectives And Risks

By Jim Roddy, president, Business Solutions magazine and Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

During StorageCraft’s keynote presentation May 29 at the ASCII Success Summit in Columbus, OH, Mark Crall, senior channel account manager, presented an interesting — and very specific — line of questioning for MSPs. Asking these questions will help solutions providers quantify their customers’ objectives and risks in regards to data recovery and help MSPs sell Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Offsite Backup-as-a-Service (OBaaS).

Crall recommended asking these four questions:

1. How long can your business afford to be without access to critical IT services?

Minutes, hours, or days: ___

Lost productivity cost: ___ per minute, hour, or day

MTPOD: ___ (maximum tolerable period of disruption)

2. How much information can you afford to lose?

Minutes, hours, or days: ___

Lost productivity cost: ___ per minute, hour, or day

3. How much data are you required to keep?

Retention objective: ___ days, months, or years

Granularity objective ___ hours, days, weeks, months, years

4. When is the last time you tested this?

The ASCII Success Summit – Columbus is being held May 28-29 at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Columbus, OH. It is one of eight solution provider-focused conferences ASCII is hosting in 2014. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII